Judge to decide if Kilmar Abrego Garcia returns to immigration custody
GREENBELT, Md. (AP) — A federal judge will hear arguments Monday on whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be returned to immigration custody after being free for just over a week.
Abrego Garcia, whose erroneous deportation to El Salvador became a lightning rod for both sides of the immigration debate, had been in immigration detention since August. In the meantime, the government has announced plans to deport him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and, most recently, Liberia. However, authorities have made no effort to deport him to the only country he has agreed to go to: Costa Rica. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland even accused the government of misleading her by falsely claiming that Costa Rica was unwilling to accept it.
The government’s “continued refusal to recognize Costa Rica as a viable deportation option, its threats to send Abrego Garcia to African countries that have never agreed to accept him, and its false statement to the Court that Liberia is now the only country available to Abrego Garcia, all reflect that whatever the purpose of his detention, it was not the ‘fundamental purpose’ of timely deportation to a third country,” she wrote.
Xinis’ Dec. 11 order ordering that Abrego Garcia be released from immigration custody also found that the immigration judge who heard his case in 2019 did not issue an order of removal from the United States and that he could not be removed anywhere without a removal order.
Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the United States illegally from El Salvador when he was a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation to his home country, finding that he was threatened there by a gang that had targeted his family. In March, he was still expelled by mistake. U.S. officials have resisted calls to bring it back until the Supreme Court rules. However, officials said he could not stay in the United States and vowed to deport him to a third country.
In papers filed last week, government attorneys argued that, with or without a final deportation order, they were still working to deport Abrego Garcia, so they could legally detain him during the process.
“If there is no final order of removal, immigration proceedings are pending and the petitioner is subject to a pre-final detention order,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that “because immigration proceedings ‘are civil and not criminal,’ the detention must be ‘non-punitive.’ They argued that in Abrego Garcia’s case, the detention is punitive because the government wants to be allowed to detain him indefinitely without a viable plan to deport him.
“If immigration detention does not serve the legitimate purpose of effecting reasonably foreseeable removal, it is punitive, potentially indefinite, and unconstitutional,” they wrote.
